Giving thanks

The turkey is in the oven, my sister is en route*, and the house is semi-presentable. In seven and a half hours I should be in bed - tomorrow is a work day, the last of this rotation. (I go back to work one day early next rotation, doing overtime on Tuesday. Five twelve-hour days in a row that are really more like eighteen- or nineteen-hour days, all told. That should be a lot of fun come next Saturday - and I'll probably be mandated for one or more days of overtime during those four days off, too. )

I have a lot to be thankful for. My family, for putting up with me in good times and bad. My friends, too, both the ones I know and interact with in person and the ones I know and interact with online, all of whom I hope to someday meet in person. My blog, and the internet community of bloggers that I've tapped into, which have kept me sane - and possibly kept me alive - through some of the most difficult times in my life. Even my job.

My job. It's not the job I want, it's not the job I thought I would have right now. It is generally recognized by all who do it as the most frustrating job any of us have held, a job where success is determined partly by skill, partly by experience, but mostly by luck, a job where the amount of effort you put into it is inversely related to the results you get out of it - the harder you try, the worse things get, until maximum effort results in guaranteed failure. But it's better than being unemployed. It pays the bills, and allows me to keep my grandmother's house in the family, and lets me do things like buy my mom a new television (hers died a few weeks ago) and a new oven (hers died in February, two weeks before I lost my job, and we had been making do with just the rangetop until the week before last.) I'm even thankful for my employer, which hired me back six months after they eliminated my old job, and allowed me to retain my old seniority and benefits.

I'm thankful for Toyota for making the 1996 Tercel, which even after 280,000 miles still gets 35-40 mpg (depending on air temperature) on the highway, and has provided reliable, comfortable, safe, and economical transportation all these years.

I'm thankful for everyone I have ever known and every experience I have ever had. They have all become a part of the tapestry of my my life. Remove one thread, and the tapestry begins to unravel...but that is a topic for another post.

Happy Thanksgiving, everybody!

*Not quite. The phone just rang again. I guess dinner will now be more like 5:00 or 6:00. I may need to slice off a few chunks of turkey to make tomorrow's lunch before we actually sit down to eat dinner.